WASHINGTON — A group of retired CIA officials on Friday accused President Bush of “hiding” behind a special investigation of White House leaks in order to avoid having to fire his longtime political adviser, Karl Rove.

The group said Bush, by allowing Rove to remain in his senior White House post after he was named as a source for news accounts disclosing the identity of a covert CIA agent married to an administration critic, had undermined American security interests abroad.

In an unofficial hearing by Democratic members of Congress, the retired CIA agents and analysts also complained that Bush has done nothing to stop the Republican National Com mittee and GOP allies in Congress from continuing a “smear” campaign against the outed agent, Valerie Plame, and her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson.

“Instead of a president concerned first and foremost with protecting this country and the intelligence officers who serve it, we are confronted with a president who is willing to sit by while political operatives savage the reputations of good Americans like Valerie and Joe Wilson,” said Larry Johnson, a former counterterrorism analyst at the CIA.

James Marcinkowski, a former CIA case officer, argued that disclosing Plame’s identity had seriously compromised the ability of the CIA to recruit foreign agents abroad to spy on their own countries or terrorist organizations.

“While blind deference to legal niceties may be accepted within the context of American politics, in an overseas setting, it just doesn’t work,” Marcinkowski said.

Protection is key to recruiting agents, he said, but guarantees of protection are undermined when the White House itself exposes members of “the home team,” he added.

Three other former intelligence officials spoke at the hearing, but Johnson and Marcinkowski were the most critical of the president, the Republican National Committee and GOP members of Congress. This was notable, because they both have backgrounds in Republican politics.

The White House and the RNC did not respond immediately to requests for comment Friday.

When the controversy over the leaks first began two years ago, the president vowed to fire anyone at the White House who was involved but did not indicate whether he was aware of the facts of the case.

Since Rove’s role has emerged in recent weeks, however, the president has routinely deflected questions from reporters about his senior aide by citing the confidentiality of the special investigation under way. And this week he shifted his position a bit, saying he would fire anyone on his staff who “committed a crime.”

It is difficult to prosecute anyone for breaking the federal law against identifying covert intelligence agents, because the law requires that someone “knowingly” disclosed the agents identify. Rove has said he did not know Wilson’s wife’s name, and did not provide that name to anyone.

But Rove was one of the sources for Time magazine’s online report on the Plame-Wilson connection on the same day of a column by conservative commentator Robert Novak, and according to Wilson, Rove subsequently told MSNBC’s “Hardball” host Christ Matthews that “Wilson’s wife is fair game” in the White House defense of his rationale for war against Iraq.

Friday’s hearing was hosted by Democratic members of the Senate and House, but was not an official proceeding of the Congress. The Democratic lawmakers organized the hearing after the Republican leaders of the congressional committees with jurisdiction over such matters rejected their requests for oversight hearings.

“A special standard seems to apply to Karl Rove — there will be no questions asked, and no accountability,’ said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform.

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The hearing followed news accounts that the years-long special investigation into the leak of Plame’s name to Novak is focusing increasingly on a classified State Department memo.

The memo identified Plame in a paragraph marked “secret” and questioned the credibility of Wilson’s debunking administration pre-war claims that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear material in Africa for weapons of mass destruction. It accompanied Secretary of State Colin Powell aboard Air Force One on a trip to Africa with Bush on July 7, 2003, seven days before Novak’s column appeared.

Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., the ranking minority member of the House Rules Committee, said the recent revelations about that memo raise new questions that should be addressed by Congress and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald: “What did President Bush know about the Valerie Plame leak, and when did he know it?”

With Friday’s hearing attracting less media attention that the usual congressional hearing, the Democrats arranged for Johnson to deliver their party’s response to the president’s Saturday radio address to the nation.

Johnson explained Friday that he had supported Bush in the 2000 election because he was disgusted with the lengths to which President Clinton went to avoid accountability for his sexual misconduct, even disputing “what the meaning of ‘is’ is” in his grand jury testimony about his relationship with onetime White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Now, he said, with Bush refusing to get to the bottom of the White House leaks about Plame, “I fear our political debate in this country will degenerate into an argument about what the meaning of ‘leak’ is.”

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